Pages

Marginalia

Accumulations

Daniel Valente Dantas. Graphic: VEJA magazine, May 2006, when it reported: “Daniel Dantas has a list that may show illegal offshore bank accounts controlled by the president and party bigwigs.” VEJA had plenty of evidence that “almost certainly does not” was the phrase to use instead of “may.”

By a vote of 4-1, the Fifth Chamber of the federal appeals court (STJ) today denied the habeas corpus petition of banker Daniel Dantas and upheld all the proceedings in the Operation Satiagraha investigation by the federal police, which culminated in the arrest of the Opportunity founding partner in July 2008. The decision leaves Judge Fausto Martin de Sanctis in charge of the case.

The petition was filed by the defense at the end of last year, and an injunction was granted suspending the Satiagraha investigation until the merits of the petition was adjudicated by the magistrates of the Fifth Chamber.

The injunction suspending the case was granted by Arnaldo Esteves Lima, who immediately thereafter left on vacation along with his colleagues, the Judiciary being in Christmas recess. With the temporary decision, all the actions in the case were frozen.

The Dantas defense questioned the impartiality of Judge de Sanctis, in charge of the case in the Sixth Criminal Bar of São Paulo. In their view, the judge tainted the proceedings with biased decisions and comments on the case outside of official proceedings.

This is not the first time the banker’s attorneys have contested the judge. Early last year, the Special Organ of the Regional Federal Court (TF) of the Third Region declined to open proceeding against de Sanctis for disobedience after the judge handed down a second arrest warrant for Dantas, even after Supreme Court Chief Justice Mendes ordered the banker released.

Had the judge been ordered to recuse himself, all rulings to date, including the sentencing of Dantas to 10 years in prison for bribery of a federal police agent and the indictment that made Dantas and 13 others defendants in a financial crimes case would have been overturned.

A classic moment in the federal police report was an intercepted e-mail from an Opportunity executive to an attorney at the Gordilho lawfirm, advising him that the deadline for the “defamation campaign” had been set, and had he lined up the willing journalist — possibly a senior columnist, now deceased, at O Globo — yet?

Dantas, an MIT graduate, was once the chief financial advisor to the PFL political party — the Party of the Liberal Front — nowadays known, weirdly, as the Democrats.

His original attorney, Nélio Machado, is now busy defending the DEM governor of the federal district, caught on video taking and distributing bribed money. He says the governor is the victim of a Nixonian ratfink campaign in the press.

Same defense he offered for Dantas, and the same defense offered in defending a suit brought by Citibank against the Opportunity group in New York. They showed supporting newspaper clippings of the Brazilian press to the judge as evidence of these claims and he nearly laughed them out of court.

Click to zoom:

As to the defamatory text, Opportunity would prefer that the lawyer write it, as it would be better if were written by a civil rather than a criminal lawyer.

The defamation campaign against the judge waged by Consultor Jurídico — a legal news ervice run by the proprietor of a PR agency representing numerous Dantas attorneys — accused the jurist of being Nazi-inspired for having cited German jurist Carl Schmidt in a speech or essay, I forget which.

(The Chief Justice had himself cited Schmidt in the past, it turned out.)

Out and out naked cooption of journos into running libel written by libel lawyers under their own byline.